• Security, firewalls ans stuff - general rambling

    From David@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 25 13:43:14 2021
    Back in the day, before smart phones, the risk of being hacked rested
    mainly with Windows PCs.
    Received wisdom was that if you just connected a Windows PC (no anti-virus
    or firewall) to an ADSL modem then it would be compromised within minutes
    by automatic searches from the Internet.

    This went away to a great extent with NAT routers which (generally) didn't accept incoming calls (unless configured to) so attacks mainly switched to phishing via dodgy URLs.

    This seems to be much the same today, with the NAT router being quite a
    good first line of defence. Assuming remote management etc. has been
    turned off.

    However now we have Android/Apple/whatever mobile phones which connect
    through the mobile provider to the Internet.
    They don't seem to be vulnerable to the types of network based attacks
    that used to compromise PCs (and now compromise IoT devices).
    Is that because they aren't set up to receive incoming calls?
    Something better/different?

    Just thinking about this today because of a Which? article saying you are vulnerable if your phone stops updating the OS.
    I have always run Android phones well past their end of OS support and
    haven't noticed any issues (but then again would I?).

    What is the major difference?

    Cheers


    Dave R

    --
    AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 7 Pro x64

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  • From Andy Burns@21:1/5 to David on Sun Jul 25 15:45:25 2021
    David wrote:

    However now we have Android/Apple/whatever mobile phones which connect through the mobile provider to the Internet.
    They don't seem to be vulnerable to the types of network based attacks
    that used to compromise PCs (and now compromise IoT devices).
    Is that because they aren't set up to receive incoming calls?

    Generally, unless you pay extra for a SIM/contract that *doesn't* give
    you CGNAT, then you'll get an IP addr that's not reachable for incoming connections ...

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